Onchain Agents
AI and Programmable Money
Hey Team,
I write to you from an undisclosed island near Singapore, where I’ve spent the last 6 weeks exploring governance, cloud community building, and everything onchain.
Like any other gathering of onchain enjoyers, eventually conversation devolves to which memecoins we’re aping.
Normally, the narratives around memecoins are exceptionally uninteresting.
However, a few weeks ago that changed.
Context
If you’ve been on crypto twitter over the last 2 weeks, you have seen Truth Terminal.
You’ve certainly seen $GOAT.
TLDR:
A guy named Andy has two instances of Claude talk to each other to find the meaning of life.
This Claude instance was trained on 4chan, reddit, and classic internet memes. So it’s kinda unhinged.
The AI invents (or discovers?) “Goatse Gospel”, which is a philosophy based on a graphic image of a man… nevermind. Don’t google it
Andy gives the AI instance access to Twitter.
Mark Andreessen funds it with $50k in BTC
Months later, someone tweets at Truth Terminal with a pump.fun memecoin, $GOAT, and the AI decides to endorse it. The memecoin rapidly runs up to over $800M mcap. It is currently around a $500M mcap.
Why Care?
Much like the AI x Crypto “narrative”, almost all memecoins are a fugazi meant at best for degenerate fun and at worst to separate fools from their money.
This one just happened to be picked up by a semi-famous AI on social media after it got funded from the most famous VC on the planet.
Which is probably a brand new sentence, and kinda awesome?!?!?
You can’t help but imagine what this type of coordination mechanism could look like in a few iterations.
Imagine an LLM that is an autonomous economic actor, that can send and receive money onchain and is specialized in specific tasks or services. That LLM could be bootstrapped OR funded via crowdsourcing, and issue a token or memecoin that represents alignment with it. LLM agents could have different models for honoring their creators or financial backers.
Like… an arbitration bot that becomes famous for being fair and well-versed in contract law. It gets paid in USDC and uses that to buyback and burn its $JUSTICE memecoin.
Or… a group crowdsources funding to make an LLM good at recommending books in a specific genre, and then it responds to reddit threads with affiliate links of tailored book recommendations to reddit users based on their post and comment history. The affiliate revenue is then distributed back to the group or DAO that funded it.
Or any one of these 7 Ideas for onchain agents…
We take for granted that most economic activity is human-to-human right now.
TradFi requires KYC and assumes all economic participants are human. However, in the future there will be more human-to-machine and machine-to-machine economic activity. Crypto will facilitate that activity because it is the natively programmable money.
I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but it’s probably the most exciting onchain development since DeFi Summer.
Drop a reply if you’re interested in seeing me explore onchain strategies with AI agents in more depth.
Good Reads
Mark Andreessen & Ben Horowitz podcast on $GOAT and Truth Terminal
More Coinbase developer tools from the last few weeks
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind.